I am seeing lots of persons of color in white churches. I am not seeing them sitting with white people but sitting with other black people, surrounded by white people. What I am not seeing are persons of color in executive positions at these places. I am not seeing cultural diversity in their graphic presentations, in their branding, not hearing it in their music. The recession was the defibrillator jolt that dislodged many black churchgoers from their home base and sent them out surveying, as I have been surveying, the landscape in search of a more meaningful Sunday experience. But, at what cost? What does the migration of blacks to white MegaChurches mean for our tradition and culture?
Black
Is The New White
A friend brought to my
attention that, in 2013 black acts were almost completely
missing from the top levels of Billboard’s Hot 100, replaced
instead by white acts making a fortune by sounding black—Justin
Timberlake, Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and others.
Meanwhile, over on the Gospel charts, we have a different
phenomenon: black acts finding commercial success by sounding white.
Hezekiah Walker, J. Moss and others all now seem eager to
follow in the Oreo footsteps of Kurt “Angry Moose” Carr, Israel
Haughton and like-minded Gospel music sellouts who’ve abandoned
most anything that sounds like soul or, for that matter, Gospel
to instead produce mainstream (i.e. white) Contemporary
Christian music: banal, repetitious four-chord ditties
consisting of barely a handful of lyrics repeated ad nauseam
until the audience is hypnotized into a religious frenzy. This
frothy, lightweight pap is several French fries short of a Happy
Meal and an embarrassment to the art and tradition of Gospel
music in that it lacks both substance and anointing. Were I
still pastoring, I would not allow this pap to be sung in my
church or, alternatively, would insist actual lyrics which
actually feed people spiritually be written for it. Thus, we
have this new phenomena of white acts sounding black in
mainstream pop, while black acts (and everybody else) is
sounding white in “Gospel” music.
I imagine this trend is in likely response to black Church
Folks' penchant for not buying new music but illegally
downloading it, burning discs and passing them around to their
friends. I have an alarming number of friends and acquaintances,
some of them pastors, who brag about having illegally downloaded
the latest Hollywood thriller and who certainly think nothing
whatsoever of passing around copies of the latest music. These
men and women have absolutely no conscience whatsoever
about their practice. It has never, to my hearing, been preached
from any black pulpit, as even black churches tend to have
stacks of CDRs lying around with the latest tunes on them,
brought in by the faithful. Whites, on the other hand, not only
pay for their CDs but also buy the ridiculous and unnecessary
CCL license, wherein the churches support the musicians by
paying some small royalty whenever a licensed song is performed.
This is unnecessary because U.S. copyright law includes an
exemption for houses of worship, but that's another essay.
Bottom line: our black Christian music acts are turning toward
the white dollar and I can't really get all that mad at them because
we Church Folk are acting just like hypocrites, stealing their
work, breaking the law, then shouting and falling out in Sunday
services.
This sea change ties in with the phenomena
of blacks migrating to places where our culture is ignored or,
worse, eliminated, and the parallel phenomena of white churches
marketing themselves as “multicultural” while practicing a kind
of cultural nullification and having no minorities in
leadership. So long as your church—black or white—does not
position itself as “multicultural,” there really is no beef.
There’s absolutely no shame in embracing the reality that yours
is a white (or black) church. But claiming the larger and more
biblically responsive vision, of being a House of Prayer for All
People [Matt 21:13], requires self-examination, discipline,
education and sacrifice.
Calling your church “multicultural” just to fatten up the Sunday
crowd with x-percent of minority attendance while not promoting
any kind of cultural blend in the worship service is cynically
self-serving. Using stock images of dusty, crying African
children or smiling folks from India or impoverished Latin
American families in your church's literature and slideshows to
help bolster the illusion of multiculturalism while having no
faces like them in leadership is exploitative. I imagine it
makes church members feel good to think, "Well, our church sends
money to Africa." Beloved, there is so very much work that needs
to be done right here, on the very block your church is
located on. The multi-ethnic trend in churches becomes a
marketing gimmick more than a reality. Diversity and inclusivity
become sources of pride to a congregation that may be happy to
say, "We're not a white church," or "We're not a black church."
Real diversity is much harder than it sounds. The test of real
diversity is not Sunday worship but Tuesday's board meeting:
who's in the room? Who has real authority?
Lest anyone conclude an agenda to just holler at white folks,
the black church is likely the most racist of all. Generations
of harsh oppression has left us feeling absolutely no
responsibility toward any culture other than ours. However, as
we wash up on the shore of these massive, multi-million dollar
white churches, we experience bitterness and resentment that
these places—built largely by extensive, prolonged and
sacrificial giving on the part of the church membership—don’t simply hand us
the keys.
My focus, here, is on the new crop of white MegaChurches
and the growing black memberships at these places. I doubt the
white leadership of these places wastes any time at all
wondering why blacks would even want to come there, or what
experience led blacks to seek God at a place so alien to their
cultural norms. This is incredibly lazy pastoring. Everybody has
a story. If you’re a pastor, you should be curious about your
flock. You should wonder why they are there and you should work
hard to serve them. To my experience, this is not what’s
happening at many of these huge churches where it’s easy to melt
anonymously into the crowd. I have to imagine not all white
church members are happy to see an increase in black attendance
and, to my limited exposure to these places, it feels to me as
if the liturgy and general presentation in all the churches I’ve
visited has felt indifferent to the fact of our presence; white
churches making absolutely no perceptible effort to make blacks
feel part of the goings-on. We are, instead, mostly observers,
watching them have their church service.
The same is absolutely true of black churches. In my experience,
white attendees to black churches tended to get stared at,
assuming they were lost or somehow wandered into the wrong
place. The service rolls on in complete indifference to these
people as we have our worship, and only the absolute die-hard
white attendees tend to stick around as most others simply move
on to congregations where they feel more welcome and included.
Whites being the majority demographic with a history of oppression toward people of color, the dynamic within black churches is a bit different in the sense that I assume many black churchgoers feel no need to make whites feel at home. Whites have plenty of churches to go to, the finest in the city. Why should we deprive ourselves or water down our tradition to make room for whites? I also know of black pastors who deliberately target whites, turning their worship service into a kind of Oreo experience, in a really stupid and ill-advised attempt to portray their church as ethnically neutral, even though the membership is 98% black. Face it, pastor, you lead a black church. Be proud of that. Pretending to be otherwise undermines your authority because you come across as inauthentic if not untruthful. But black churches can and should be willing to broaden their worship experience to, yes, welcome whites and Latinos and Asians and whosoever will. All of which is to say, the criticisms I lodge against white churches, here, are easily charged against black churches as well. We all need to reevaluate, we all need to do better.
